Saturday, November 30, 2013

Staunton, November 30 – Illegal seizures
of land by Balkar activists in Khasanya and Belaya Rechka threatens the
existence of both Kabardino-Balkaria (KBR) and Karachayevo-Cherkessia (KChR) by
raising the spectre of a Karachayevo-Balkar Republic and as a result of a
Circassian one – the Kabards and the Cherkess are sub-groups of that nation –
as well.

Given rural overpopulation, a
complex ethnic mix, and Russian laws that are not easily applied to local
conditions, the North Caucasus has long been the site of disputes over the
control of land. But the potential of the current seizures to reorder political
arrangements in the region to trigger more inter-ethnic violence could at a
minimum force Moscow to send in more troops.

Aslan
Beshto, a Circassian activist whose people would at least initially be the
losers in any such reordering of the borders in the North Caucasus, provides a
commentary about this complex situation. His article is cast as a response to another
by Muradin Rakhayev, a Balkar leader

Illegal
land seizures by Balkars near Nalchik, Beshto writes, may seem justified and
elicit a certain sympathy given the problems of that nation. But anyone who
examines the background of these actions will be concerned given both what has
been happening and what “shadowy players” like Balkar nationalists and Turkey have
as their ultimate goals.

For the last 20 years “at a minimum,”
Beshto says, the Balkars have “cultivated the ethnic myth that all the
present-day territory of Kabardino-Balkaria is the immemorial land of the Balkars”
and that lands that should be under their control have been handed to others,
such as the Kabards, by outsiders.

But everyone needs to understand
that “the very same problems which exist” in Belaya Rechka exist as well in all
municipalities both of the republic and of the country as a whole.”If current arrangements are overturned by
illegal actions in one place, that can easily trigger other illegal actions
elsewhere.

If one turns to the archives, Beshto
continues, one finds that the Balkars actually seized what were historically
Kabard lands. But that is not something the Balkars care to acknowledge
now.Instead, at the end of last summer,
the “Vestnik Balkarii” published a declaration saying that the “Kabard people
in general has no rights” to make any claim to these lands.

As a Circassian, Beshto says, he has
encountered “such manifestations of nationalism constantly,” most disturbingly
in a declaration also last summer of the Council of Elders of the Balkar People
which declared that “the next step” for the group should be “the establishment
of a Karachayevo-Balkar (Alan) Republic” in place of the bi-national KBR and
KChR.

“If that were to happen,” the
Circassian activist continues, “then the division of Kabardino-Balkaria would
occur” along the borders of the existing municipalities, with all the impact
that would have on neighboring areas, including the KChR.

Beshto suggests that standing behind
the Balkars is Turkey with its plans for a Greater Turan and that the Balkars,
a Turkic people, have been able to invoke Russian law to justify what they are
doing even though the specific law on local administration was drawn up with an
eye to parts of Russia not suffering from overpopulation and a shortage of
land.

“By some miracle and thanks to the
wisdom” of Gennady Khloponin, the presidential plenipotentiary for the area, Beshto
says, the current crisis may have passed, but he argues that the authorities
have been too inclined to make concessions to the Balkars in the past and that
as a result the Balkars are increasing their demands.

That leaves Khloponin and Moscow
with few good choices: if the Russian authorities continue to give in to the
Balkars, the Circassians will mobilize to oppose them, but if the Russians don’t,
Moscow will have to use force to restrain the Balkars and that will only
exacerbate their national feelings.

In short, the complex
administrative-territorial system that Stalin created and left behind him, one that requires high levels
of coercion to maintain, remains a poison pill for Moscow in the North Caucasus
in the first instance but ultimately in other regions of the Russian Federation
as well.

Staunton, November 30 – As many as four
percent of the residents of Novosibirsk
Oblast are estimated to be HIV infected and thus likely to develop AIDS, a rate
approaching those found in some sub-Saharan African countries and one that
constitutes a major health emergency in the Russian Federation as a whole,
public health officials in that Siberian region say.

But as bad as the situation is in
Novosibirsk oblast, it is even worse in Irkutsk and Kemerovo Oblasts and is
only slightly better in the Altay Kray and Tomsk Oblast, all of which are
within the boundaries of the Siberian Federal District. Beyond that district,
the situation in Sverdlovsk and Samara Oblasts are also worrisome (news.ngs.ru/more/1518008/).

Not
only is this a public health disaster, but the high costs of treating those
with HIV/AIDS means that it is a major burden on the Russian budget. A simple
calculation based on the figures provided in this article suggests that Moscow
is spending upwards of 300 million US dollars per year on HIV/AIDS medication
in Novosibirsk Oblast alone.

Natalya
Shulgina, a Novosibirsk specialist on HIV/AIDS, says that the number infected
is not only high but rising, the result of more widespread diagnostics, on the
one hand, but also of high levels of tuberculosis, which weaken the body’s
ability to fight off the infection, and the spread of drug abuse by which the
infection is spread, on the other.

The
first case of HIV/AIDS in Novosibirsk was identified in1990 in a man who had
been infected during a trip to Mozambique. He died in 1995.By the end of the 1990s, there were a total
of 308 diagnoses of the disease there, Shulgina said, most of whom had
contracted it by the sharing of needles for injection of illegal drugs.

.But over the last decade, she
continued, the disease has spread beyond that high risk group.One measure of this change: in 200, only two
to three percent of those diagnosed with HIV were working; now, 33 percent of
them are.

Treatment is available but it is very
expensive, Shulgina continued.The cost
per patient per month ranges from 200,000 to 300,000 rubles (6000 to 10,000 US
dollars) a month and more if the individual is suffering from additional
diseases.It is paid by the federal
government exclusively, she added. Novosibirsk is currently treating 4,000
cases.

The medicines are effective, she pointed
out. Before they were available, someone infected with HIV could expect to live
on average only five to ten years.Now,
with therapy, such an individual could expect to live 20 to 25 years. The
medicines have also allowed doctors to ensure that HIV-infected mothers do not pass
on the disease. A decade ago, 30 to 50 percent of children born to HIV-infected
mothers had HIV; now, the figure is 1.5-3.0 percent.

The biggest problem those with HIV have
is the public stigma of the disease.Many are afraid to tell anyone that they have the disease or even be
checked to see if they do.As a result,
they remain untreated and more likely to pass it on to others.The situation in this regard is improving,
activists say, but the numbers in Novosibirsk are an indication of how much
more needs to be done.

Staunton, November 30 – Only 1100 of
the 560,000 inmates of Russia’s prison camps are serving time for Islamist
extremism, but increasingly this small group along with Islamists who have been
convicted of crimes is spreading its radical message to many confined for other
crimes, a phenomenon Russian commentators are calling “prison Islamization.”

Lastwek, Valery Trofimov, head of
the Russian penitentiary system, said that whileradicals of all kinds, including Russian
nationalists, are using the prisons as “universities,” the Islamists “represent
a threat not only because they are able to effectively spread their ideology to
other Muslim convicts but also draw into their ranks prisoners of other faiths”
(interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=53512).

At present, he said, penal officials
are engaged in prophylactic work with 426 prisoners, a 40 percent increase from
a year earlier and a trend reflecting the general increase in the number of
inmates convicted of crimes arising from “political, ideological, racial,
national or religious hatred.” Their numbers have roughly doubled since 2009.

Within the Russian corrective labor
camp system, Trofimov said, there are now 279 Islamic communities which unite
soe 10,600 Muslims. There are 51 mosques in operation, and three more are being
built. There are 228 Muslim prayer room, and there are more than 85 Muslim
courses in which “more than 7800” inmates are enrolled.

Trofimov added that he and his Russian
colleagues are currently studying the work of officials in Saudi Arabia, Yemen,
Egypt and Iran concerning the “rehabilitation” of Islamic fundamentalists,
including the plans of these countries to set up “centers for the
rehabilitation of radicals.”

The FSIN director’s report was
delivered to an All-Russian Conference on Countering the Dissemination of
Radicalism in Places of Detention, a meeting that its organizers put together
because of three fears: the spread of radicalism among prisoners, the combination
of religious fanaticism and ordinary crime, and high rates of recidism among
prisoners (wordyou.ru/v-rossii/tyurmy-v-rossii-ee-gordost-eeki-islamisty-ee-pozor.html).

At
the meeting,Mikhail Fedotov,
head of the Presidential Council on Human Rights, laid particular stress on
what he said was “the serious threat” that radicalism and ordinary criminality
are “fusing” in ways that make countering both more difficult and require the
joint efforts of state structures and civil society (kavpolit.com/tyurma-dlya-ekstrimistov/).

Roman Silantyev, a specialist on
Islam at the Moscow State Linguistics University, said that what is especially
troubling is that there is now no good way to identify Islamist radicals who
have been convicted of other crimes. He suggested that prosecutors or judges be
required to note any radical ties of those they convict (radiovesti.ru/article/show/article_id/114827).

Maksim Shevchenko, director of the
Center for Strategic Research on Religion and Politics, argued that the best
way to deal with extremists under detention is to “recognize them as political
prisoners and keep them not in separate cells but in special institutions here
the authorities could work” with them (radiovesti.ru/article/show/article_id/114781).

And Anatoly Rudy, Trofimov’s deputy,
said that the prison system has already adopted three strategies in dealing
with the problem of the spread of radicalism in general and Islamism in
particular. First, it has turned to representatives of traditional Islam to
serve as instructrs.Second, it has
redoubled efforts to confiscate and destroy radical literature. And third, it
has isolated “the most active” radicals.

But other commentators, including
Dzhannat Sergey Markus, a Muslim broadcaster, suggested that there is very
little the authorities can really hope to achieve: the nature of imprisonment
itself makes a turning to Islam even in its most radical forms an attractive
option for those incarcerated, as international experience shows (islamnews.ru/news-141897.html).

Friday, November 29, 2013

Staunton, November 29 – If Russians
regain their confidence in the future, one that involves more than sitting at
home and watching television as the Putin regime wants them to, their
nationalism can and must be democratic, tolerant, and European, according to
the leader of that country’s unregistered National Democratic Party.

In a
wide-ranging interview with Yuri Solomonov, editor of “NG-Stsenarii, published this
week, Konstantin Krylov discusses the history of Russian nationalism, the ways
in which that movement has been distorted and misunderstood, and why a
successful Russian nationalism must be both democratic and liberal (ng.ru/scenario/2013-11-26/9_nationalism_xxi.html).

Krylov, who graduated from the
philosophy faculty of Moscow State University, says that Russian nationalism “in
the course of the last century arose several times,” and each time it was
suppressed, a pattern that has distorted Russian nationalism and Russians’s
understanding of nationalism.

It arose in the years before the
1917 revolution, he continues, and “even had serious chances for victory during
World War I, when the national revolutions had already swept through Eastern
Europe.” But that positive development was broken off by the Bolsheviks who
viewed Russian nationalism as an enemy.

Indeed, after the revolution, there
is no reason to speak about Russian nationalism at all. Stalin did not support
it despite what many think.The nature
of his regime “excluded” that possibility.“But in the 1960s, at the time of Khrushchev’s thaw, there appeared politically
concerned citizens of liberal views.”

The circles they formed “could not
but be anti-Soviet,” but tragically, it was also “infected by the most serious
form of Russophobia,” not least of all as a result of KGB penetration. Instead
of blaming Marxism and Soviet power for what had gone wrong, these people
blamed the chief victim of the Soviet sytem, the ethnic Russian majority.

That trend in intellectual circles was
reinforced, Krylov says, by the Soviet stte which dealt with Russian dissents “much
more harshly” than it did with liberals.The “only well-known Russian dissent who was officially recognize as a
Russian nationalist and who as a result won world-wide fame was Solzhenitsyn.”

The current generation of Russian
liberals has “completely inherited Russophobia as the foundation of its
ideology. If an individual doesn’t show hatred to Russians, then he simply won’t
be admitted to the ‘liberal’ club.” And Krylov continues, that is especially
the case if he is himself an ethnic Russian.

“As a result, these people strictl
speaking have long ceased to be liberals and dmeocrats if they ever were.” They
oppose genuine elections because the population might not vote their way since “they
are sincerely convinced that the Russian people even two hundred years fom now
will not become European.”

“For them,” Krylov argues, “the
Russians are ‘white Negroes,’ who will never become a civilized people.”

In reality, he continues, “the ‘non-European
nature’ of Russia is explained by banal poverty and national oppression.” When
people say you can’t compare Tuscany and Pskov, Krylov says, he wanted to
respond: “Give Pskov Oblast as much money as Tuscany has and then compare the
two.”

To say this is not to say that ethnic
Russians do not have problems. “Happily, the Russian people is not an invalid.
[Its] situation is better: the people have hands, [but unfortunately] they are
tied up.”What is “surprising,” Krylov
continues, is that having been subject to state oppression “already 100 years, the
people haven’t entirely lost their best qualities.”

The current government of the Russian
Fedeation does not understand this reality, he says.But “the current regime of administration is
approaching its final stage.”At the
strt of the Putin era, “the population was offered some inspiring” if not especially
clever” ideas, “but now there is only one idea left.”

In simplest terms, this idea can be
expressed by the slogan “One must sit at home!” in front of the television tuned
to the First Chanel with a bottle of beer.” That is all the Putin regime offers
Russians now, Krylov says.

To understand where the Russian national
movement is now, he argues, one must understand the history of “the ‘Russian
party’ of Soviet times,” a group that is commonly assumed to have been
nationalist but in fact was simply an effort by the authorities to redirect
protest attitudes that it couldn’t suppress.

That should be obvious, Krylov says, because
“for a Russian nationalist to be a Stalinist” is just as “impossible” as for
Jews to be for Hitler, but the Soviets and the liberals succeeded in presenting
Russian nationalism as exactly that kind of combination, completely ignoring
the fact that “nationalism arises when people begin to distinguish the nation
and the state.”

Krylov argues that Russian
nationalists can and must be democratic because the overwhelming majority of
the country consists of Russians.Supporting a dictatorship is “a breeding ground for aggressive
minorities” or for those who are without hope.Russians who support a dictatorship do so because they want everyone to
live equally badly.

“Russians must be free, rich and
have power in their own country,” Krylov says.And everyone needs to recognize that this does not mean that they will
ignore the rights of minorities. No one benefits from that. Indeed, he concludes,
those Russians who do oppress minorities hurt themselves in the first instance.